Fanart to commemorate the final performance of μ's. (Made with Clip Studio Paint!)

#love live!#fanart#digital

Sketch

Group pictures can be tough to plan out, so I decided to make a sort of "post-concert group photo" scene. I keep my sketches pretty loose.

Lineart 1

The girls' outfits are all slightly different with a lot of details, so I kept references in another window. I thought about sketching the outfit details first, but in the end I just drew them straight into the lineart. (When I add too much details to my sketches, it just feels like I'm drawing everything twice.)

Lineart 2

I did the three on the left on a new level. The sketch for Eli (on the far right) had been bugging me, so I made a second sketch layer to draw a new one, and adjusted Nozomi a bit before inking her as well.

Lineart 3

I also belatedly started drawing adjacent characters on separate layers so that I could erase stray lines more easily.

Finishing Touches

The lines are done! I added pupils to their eyes to make them look a little less soulless, haha. I also ended up doubling the layer with the first three girls, since they're closest to the viewer yet seemed to have the thinnest lines.

Color

I put all of the lineart on one layer (a duplicate - I kept the original separate ones just in case) and colored them dark pink, then made a light pink background with a slight gradient and signed the corner. Good to go!

Because you marked this for critique... critique time! :) Though since you've already finished it, hopefully my comments will be useful for a future piece.

I really, really like the attention to detail in this piece! Not only does each of the girl have her own costume design, but you took care to take into account their personalities in the expressions, poses, and interactions with each other.

The key weak point I see I think probably has to do with the poses! Your grasp on anatomy seems to be pretty solid, but I think the poses themselves could be more energetic. Currently, most of the girl's action lines seem to be fairly straight, if that makes sense. In a future piece, it might help to draw action lines for each character in your sketch stage, both to give you a sense of how to exaggerate each character's pose and to see how each of the poses work together as a whole.

If you ever want to reboot this piece, I'd also love to see if full color would work out with this piece! Since the concept is supposed to be a post-concert photo, I think there's lots of opportunity to practice lighting and creating a sense of depth (maybe creating a vague sense of the stage behind them?) Here's just a random photo from Google images to show what I might imagine.

jojostory Thank you so much for this critique, it's really helpful! I have a major problem with boring poses which I'm dimly aware of, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it in such a large group picture while keeping it roughly postcard/photo sized. Maybe I should try a longer canvas so I have more room for dynamic poses?
This is all really great crit and suggestions, I'd love to try drawing another picture of them with full color and better action! Thank you again!